Building a Wifi Radio – Part 1, Introduction

This article is the first of a series that will document the development of a low cost, open source wireless streaming internet radio receiver. All construction details, including schematics, source code, and even the design process itself will be documented on this blog.

Some background:

According to Wikipedia, in 1993 the first internet radio program began distribution. At that time, radio programs were manually downloaded to be played later on the user’s home computer; the user experience was far from that of listening to a traditional broadcast radio receiver. It was not until several years later that streaming radio became common, giving birth to internet radio stations that could be listened to much like traditional radio, but with several advantages. Most notably, internet radio stations were (and still are for the most part) largely devoid of on-air advertising, and stations anywhere on the globe could be received by anyone with access to the internet. Over time, improvements in audio compression (such as MP3) and larger end user bandwidth improved the fidelity and reliability of internet radio. The birth of common standards like Shoutcast made it possible to listen to many stations with a single player program, like Winamp.

Today, most music playback software supports streaming radio in some way. iTunes features thousands of streaming radio stations and even supports Shoutcast streams so that users can easily add additional stations of their own.

The beautiful thing about streaming radio is the huge diversity in programming that is available. Many college radio stations have a streaming server, like KDVS. Digitally Imported hosts many electronic and dance music streams that give the listener the choice to listen to specific genres like ambient or gabber hardcore(whoa). Broadcast radio usually lumps all electronic dance music into one category, much to the dismay of their listeners (who probably tuned out during the commercial break, anyway). Gems like Slay Radio specialize in music you would never hear on broadcast FM, like Commodore 64remixes.

In the past couple years, products have started to appear that mimic the form and function of a traditional radio, but play internet radio instead. Good examples of these are the Roku SoundbridgeRadio and the ASUS Internet Air. Remote speaker devices, such as the Apple Airport Express, require a PC to receive and relay streaming radio but achieve a similar end result (but don’t really look much like a radio).

The Wifi Radio project:

I have been wanting to build a streaming radio for some time. I frequently work in my garage, where I occasionally use my Macbook to play music through a small amplifier and bookshelf speakers. The problem is that my laptop is not always set up in the garage, and greasy fingers are not a good thing to have around a white laptop, period. I could simply buy an internet radio, but I couldn’t stomach the $150-$300 price tag on most players for such a luxury.

So I decided to build one instead.

I started the design process by drafting an outline of desired features, and then breaking them down into wants and needs, while trying to keep the project scope under control.

Now that we’ve defined the project… it’s time for a commercial break. That’s it for part 1 of this series. Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll talk about choosing an embedded platform for the design and why Linux is so awesome!

Bob – It should be possible, but there might be other Linux distros that are better suited for the PIII thin clients than OpenWRT. You could also look into using a Raspberry Pi.
I’m not aware of a USB amp that does what you want but I agree that sounds like it would be a nice idea.

Hi
I need help for wireless router work in OpenWrt . I want to display just upload and download using by this router using same project in Wifi radio project .
I want to use same AVR circuit and using LCD display
16×2 or GLCD . I need help how we can get the data for router and monitor it by LCD .